My life

As I proceeded to answer the questions, the convention got back to talking, except to cheer when Mike’s name was mentioned. I felt as if the speech was a two hundred–pound rock I was pushing up a hill. I later joked that I knew I was in trouble when, at the ten-minute mark, the American Samoan delegation started roasting a pig.

A few minutes later, the ABC and NBC networks started roasting me, showing the distracted convention hall and asking when I was going to finish. Only CBS and the radio networks ran the entire speech without critical commentary. The convention press people obviously hadn’t been told how long I was expected to speak, or what I was trying to do. Also, the way I wrote the speech was all wrong. In an attempt to tell Mike’s story without too much interruption by applause, I made it both too conversational and too “teachy.” It was a big mistake to think I could speak only to people watching on TV without regard to how I would go over with the delegates.

I had some good lines, but, alas, the biggest applause I got was near the painful end, when I said, “In closing. . . .” It was thirty-two minutes of total disaster. I kidded Hillary afterward that I wasn’t sure just how badly I’d bombed until we were walking out of the arena and she started going up to total strangers and introducing me as her first husband.

Fortunately, Mike Dukakis wasn’t hurt by my misadventure. He got good reviews for naming Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate; they both gave good speeches; and the ticket left Atlanta with a hefty lead in the polls. On the other hand, I was a dead man walking.

On July 21, Tom Shales wrote a devastating piece in the Washington Post that summed up the press reaction to my speech: “As Jesse Jackson had electrified the hall on Tuesday, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas calcified it Wednesday night.” He called it “Windy Clinty’s classic clinker,” and described in agonizing detail what the networks did to fill time until I finished. When we woke up the next morning, Hillary and I knew I had jumped into another pit I’d have to dig myself out of. I had no idea how to begin, except to laugh at myself. My first public response was: “It wasn’t my finest hour. It wasn’t even my finest hour and a half.” I kept my game face on, but I promised myself I would never again abandon my own instincts about a speech. And except for a brief moment in my speech to Congress on health care in 1994, I didn’t.

I was never so glad to get back home in my life. Arkansans were mostly supportive. My paranoid supporters thought I’d been set up by somebody. Most people just thought I’d sacrificed my normal spark and spontaneity to the shackles of a written speech. Robert “Say” McIntosh, a volatile black restaurateur with whom I’d had an on-again, off-again relationship, rose to my defense, slamming the media coverage and hosting a free lunch at the state Capitol for anyone who turned in a postcard or letter hitting back at one of my national media critics. More than five hundred people showed up. I got about seven hundred letters on the speech, 90 percent of them positive. Apparently the people who wrote them had all heard the speech on radio or watched it on CBS, where Dan Rather at least waited until it was over to get his digs in.

A day or so after I returned, I got a call from my friend Harry Thomason, producer of the successful TV